Re: Bug 23934 - Proposal: Always launch permission prompt to avoid leakage

On Dec 10, 2013, at 7:58 AM, Stefan Håkansson LK <stefan.lk.hakansson@ericsson.com> wrote:

> Is there broad consensus that there is no point in trying to be careful 
> when it comes to fingerprinting - that it is a battle that is already lost?

I do not believe that IE, Safari, Firefox, or Chrome have any announced plan to remove the fingerprinting vectors that are in publically published research today. I'm not saying that none of them care - I suspect that they do care, but I think the people that looks at what it would take to fix that without removing widely used features just don't see it as feasible to fix all of it - thus they have no systematic plan to fix it. 

I would love to be wrong about this and would be happy to hear how any one of the browsers was going to fix the issues identifed in even just Hovav Shacham's papers on fingerprinting. I do my best  to follow this space and, as much as I wish we could stop fingerprinting, I'm afraid that the news is not good. Don't get me wrong - I do want to be careful - I'd like to minimize fingerprinting where we can but when it comes to not having any way to provide some useful user experience because that feature might enable a type of fingerprinting that is already easy to do on the same browsers, that does not make sense to me. 

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2013 06:13:41 UTC